Saturday, September 22, 2012

Immigrant Song

Details, dilemmas and domestic discord have
been at the core of so-called novels of realism almost from the beginning.
Despite huge shifts in the way we see the world, they keep coming, these
everyday sagas of characters facing ups and downs and undergoing changes in
their efforts to win through. In a 2008 essay, Zadie Smith had written that if
the genre was to survive, lyrical realists would have to push a little harder
and try and discover new ways of representation. Nevertheless, such
explorations are few and far between, and Nell Freudenberger’s new novel can’t
be counted as being among them.

Within her chosen genre, however, Freudenberger
has proved herself to be an accomplished practitioner, as her debut short story
collection, Lucky Girls, and
subsequent novel, The Dissident, amply
demonstrate. As with those books, The
Newlyweds takes as its theme the predicament of a stranger in a strange
land, of the cultural shifts and changing attitudes that immigrants have to
undergo.

This is the story of Amina, a 24-year-old woman
from Bangladesh, who comes to the United States to marry George, a “34-year-old
SWM”, the two having developed an online relationship after George responded to
Amina’s post on a matrimonial site. Far from home, ensconced in Rochester,
Amina learns to navigate the contours of a new relationship and country. She
meets George’s family, including his adopted free-spirited cousin, Kim, takes
classes at a local college as well as a succession of jobs, including those of
a shop assistant, yoga school receptionist and coffee shop barista. George
turns out to be a conservative, Casaubon-like creature and her relationship
with him, while not wildly exciting or disappointing, proceeds much of the time
on an even keel as they discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

By providing particulars of Amina’s reactions
to the food, surroundings, weather and her various adjustments and discoveries,
Freudenberger thickens the narrative and adds verisimilitude. Inevitably, these
put one in mind of other such fiction, notably by Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali --
in whose accounts of displaced lives, it must be said, one finds more intimacy
and granularity.

George and Amina’s conflicting points of view
on living with family versus living alone provide one of the novel’s main
pivots, allowing Freudenberger to explore differences in Western and Eastern
attitudes. Finally, after three years in the United States, Amina returns to Bangladesh
to bring her parents back with her. (The gifts she takes for her family and
friends show Freudenberger’s eye for detail at its most acute.) Back in her own country, Amina is immediately
plunged into extended family squabbles and less-than-ideal living conditions.
Here, she once again meets and is attracted to Nasir, a childhood friend – in
fact, there’s a too-neat complementarity between this relationship and between
that of George and Kim. Conflicts, though, are handled in an unvaryingly
low-key and leisurely manner, as equations between Amina, George and her
parents are played out.

One of the strengths of The Newlyweds is its nuanced rendering of cultural displacement;
another is that Freudenberger sticks close to her characters without feeling
the need to make overarching pronouncements.
The Newlyweds checks all the right boxes, then, but in doing so it also
emerges as a story that’s all too familiar. “It is only by sharing our stories
that we become one community,” writes Amina in the novel’s closing lines, and
while there’s no denying this sentiment, it’s also true that the tales that make
the most impression are those that throw fresh light, or are rendered in fresh
ways.